Latin America, and the world more broadly, has been mired in crisis throughout the first quarter of the 21st century. From economic downturns to ecological disasters to legacies of racism and enslavement, the neoliberal trends of past decades have permeated our daily lives with instability amid longstanding narratives of constant progress. If, as we are told, our society is constantly progressing, why has precarity abounded? In The Return of the Contemporary: The Latin American Novel in the End Times, Nicolás Campisi explores the ways in which contemporary Latin American authors confront these realities, focusing on the genre of the novel.

Campisi, an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese, examines non-linear approaches to constructing the novel in order to work against “presentism,” which he defines as “a temporality that summons the past through nostalgic images and creates a paralysis in the exercise of imagining perspectives of change” (155). By returning to past literary traditions and historical events and invoking them discontinuously, the novels Campisi thought-provokingly analyzes all propose a departure from discourses of crisis and envisage a future beyond the apocalyptic cynicism of the present.

The Return of the Contemporary: The Latin American Novel in the End Times by Nicolás Campisi (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024, 272 pages)

A noteworthy aspect of The Return of the Contemporary is its comparative approach. Each chapter pairs two narratives from different regions of Latin America, bringing together novels from Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Chile. Beyond demonstrating a hemispheric interconnectedness despite differing narrative and thematic approaches, this book unites Latin America under a shared experience of nearing apocalypse in the neoliberal era. Campisi constructs this claim over the course of two sections. The first section, “Deep Histories of the Present,” focuses on novels that contextualize contemporary crisis within centuries-long histories of colonialism and nation building. The second, “Returns of History and Time,” considers narratives by authors who grew up during the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, but have inherited only fragmentary knowledge of their past, and therefore the present.

The first section opens with “The Return of Nature: The Novel of Crisis,” which examines novels from the Dominican Republic and Argentina that return to the countries’ respective pasts during moments of crisis. Both La mucama de Omicunlé (2015) by Rita Indiana and El año del desierto (2005) by Pedro Mairal were published in the wake of disasters, ecological in the case of the 2011 earthquake effecting the Dominican Republic and financial in Argentina’s 2001 socioeconomic collapse. In El año del desierto, Mairal’s protagonist travels back in time through Argentina’s history over the course of a year, eventually settling with an Indigenous group and then returning to the Ireland of her ancestors. This time travel effectively inverts the colonial genre of the crónica de indias, in which European conquistadors documented the discovery, conquest and colonization in the Americas, implying a trajectory of advancement with European influence. La mucama de Omicunlé centers on an endangered species of sea anemone native to the Caribbean that allows travel to other places and times, including 17th-century Hispaniola. Indiana’s novel invokes Afro-Caribbean religious practices and links corporeal and ecological destruction by positioning them both as the result of the extractivism permitted by unchecked capitalism. Campisi demonstrates that by situating the novels’ narratives within the context of nation-building, the authors simultaneously question the ideas of perpetual national progress and contemplate new possibilities for constructing lifestyles beyond capitalism.

Chapter 2, “A Toxic History of the Present: The Novel of Ecohorror,” looks at dystopian narratives from Mexico and Argentina that respond to the oppressive and unstable reality of climate change in the contemporary era. Campisi theorizes the category of “ecohorror,” an aesthetic that evokes negative emotions to global ecological crisis. In El huésped (2006) by Mexican author Guadalupe Nettel, after environmental collapse, a woman blinded by a parasitic infection joins an underground collective of blind people in Tenochtitlán-Mexico City, who seek to fight neoliberal capitalism by recovering Indigenous communal knowledge. On the other hand, ecological devastation in Distancia de rescate (2014) by Samantha Schweblin is present in the emergence of agrochemical poisoning of children, narrated by the voices of two women in different temporalities, delineated by roman and italicized type. Both novels situate their narratives in what Campisi characterizes as environments of “a repressed past,” the modernizing project that sought to subjugate indigeneity in Mexico and fantasies of civilization triumphing over barbarism in the Argentine pampas. By visualizing the failure of these projects through the gothic, Schweblin and Nettel construct speculative futures of sustainability in their ruins.

The Return of the Contemporary’s first section ends with “The Contemporary Plantation: Memories of Slavery and the Oral History Novel.” This chapter examines the incorporation of oral histories and Afro-Latin American strategies for constructing collective memory into the form of the novel, using examples from Colombia and Brazil. Campisi asserts that since national archives have excluded slave narratives and oral histories in favor of genres like the novel, Elástico de sombra (2019) by Juan Cárdenas and Torto arado (2019) by Itamar Vieira Junior weave ethnographic essay and spoken narrative into the novel to recover Afro-diasporic histories of enslavement and emancipation. In Torto arado, this historic silence surrounding enslavement and the plantation system is allegorized through one character accidentally cutting off her tongue with her grandmother’s knife, an inherited object that stands in for the continued precarity stemming from enslavement. The final section of the novel is narrated by a water spirit who accompanies enslaved people through the Atlantic slave trade and the Afro-Brazilian diaspora, which Campisi compares to the wind character that drives Elástico de sombra’s plot. Campisi views both characters as invoking oral traditions, which then fuse with written narratives in order to give voice to the silences of the archive.

The second section begins with “The Children Return: The Novel of Postmemory,” in which Campisi explores the “literature of the children,” or literature written by authors who were raised during and after the most recent military dictatorships. This category of literature epitomizes postmemory, or a type of secondhand memory, rather than personal recollection. Julián Fuks and Verónica Gerber Bicecci, the authors of A resistência (2015) and Conjunto vacío (2015), respectively, are both children of Argentine exiles, who fled the country during the 1976-1983 military junta. In A resistência, an alter ego of the Brazilian author returns to Argentina in search of information about his adoptive brother’s past, a meandering narrative characterized by ekphrastic (vivid verbal) reproductions of photographs of the disappeared, relying on verbal depictions rather than visually portraying them. Similarly, Conjunto vacío details the protagonist’s journey from Mexico to Argentina, using extralinguistic techniques like the replacement of names with Venn diagrams in order to elucidate the irreconcilable gaps between the present and the past of the dictatorship. Fuks’ and Gerber Bicecci’s protagonists are agents in accessing and reconstructing collective memory, not by attempting to faithfully depict their families’ past as in the genre of testimonio, but by assembling fragmented histories that blur the boundaries between fiction and reality, as Campisi convincingly demonstrates.

The final chapter, “Ways of Being Contemporary: The Novel after the End of History,” further discusses the “literature of children” from Mexico and Chile that confront the specters of historical disasters in the present as a means of exploring potential horizons when the future seems untenable. Valeria Luiselli’s Los ingrávidos (2011) vacillates between 21st-century Mexico, in the wake of 2001 economic crises and the September 11 terrorist attack, and the financial crash of 1929 New York, depicting characters with relatively little historical importance. Bonsái (2006) by Alejandro Zambra is written in brief text excerpts with characters with transposable names as a means of replicating the irreconcilable gaps in post-dictatorial memory. Both novels’ nonsequential depictions of historically inconsequential actors reflect on the past with neither amnesia nor nostalgia, but also produce a sense of disorientation within the reader. Campisi situates these novels as depicting the “contemporary” as a temporality that no longer delineates between past, present and future, therefore defamiliarizing returns to the past as a means of forging a new future.

The Return of the Contemporary’s main contribution derives from its ability to connect a diverse array of texts in order to convincingly establish a coherent corpus of novels that address crisis, presentism and the contemporary. Campisi does so by bringing together not just different physical areas, but also thematic interventions, like ecology, enslavement and dictatorship, as well as areas of knowledge, such as environmental humanities, postmemory and affect studies. The book takes the unique approach of interpreting its corpus as neither cynical nor optimistic, but as the novelists’ means of grappling with the complex emotions of living through abounding crisis and employing literary techniques to consider future horizons.

Madison Felman-Panagotacos is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Middlebury College’s Department of Luso-Hispanic Studies and a scholar of modern and contemporary Latin American cultural productions.

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